How do you change a system that is determined never to
change? You rush it, the more radical the change, the better; said no strategic
adviser, ever. This elementary mistake us unavoidable when they people unite
behind change. For those who desire to remain in control, rushed radical change
is best avoided especially when trying to anticipate and avert undesirable
bottom-up change.
Repressive regimes seeking to liberalize have three pathways
to clinging to power. Double-down and hope for the best (the North Korean
Model). Instant political freedoms (the Soviet Model ca. 1989). Gradual
economic reform, followed by strengthening and modernizing the military, all
cloaked by projecting low expectations internally and offshore, with the
occasional crackdown as needed (the China Model 1978-Xi).
Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s instinct is spot-on. Yet, his
execution is more likely than not to precipitate the change he most needs to
avoid. It may not be too long before he appreciates the ultimate irony of
rushing to liberalize just as the rest of the world, including many of the old
democracies, slide into varying degrees of authoritarianism. Oh, to be young
again!
If you are excited about women getting driver’s licenses,
you are completely missing the point. Less reported, but about a thousand and
one times more important was the disempowerment of the religious police. The
nexus of power in Saudi Arabia lies at the intersection of Mosque and State.
Saudi Arabia has always been a revolutionary Islamic power. Its Sunni
revolution predated the Iranian Shiia revolution by centuries and was neatly
masked by an institution European powers could recognize: a Royal family.
Superficial mimicry of western institutions concealed an ancient culture that
lived by the sword coupled with implementation of the literal word if the
Prophet. Radical Sunni Islam was exported in exchange for maintenance of the
mask. Iran had a royal family, too. At least until radicalism could no longer
be contained.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS in the social
mediasphere) struck the religious community hard. Scores of clerics have been
arrested in simultaneous raids across the country. Said one, “all those who
thought about saying no to the government got arrested.” (NYT, 6Nov17,
p.A9). This action extends beyond the Mosque, particularly given the judicial
bureaucracy is the domain of the clerics. At least until now. It remains to be
seen whether MBS is challenging this arrangement beyond symbolic gestures.
Formally, the Royal Household interacts with the religious community through
the Council of Senior Scholars. Its carefully selected membership is unlikely
to represent the full spectrum of religious thought resident in the Kingdom.
Nevertheless, the Council has got behind the mass arrests of clerics, possibly
seeing some opportunities for its members in the short term. Yet that is no the
same as endorsing MBS’ vision if a “moderate, balanced Islam that is open to
the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples” (Ibid).
MI is skeptical that centuries of conservative religious
belief can be overturned by a round-up of radicals and the selection of
acceptable replacements. More likely, the lightning strike against extremist
elements will empower their message and drive their supporters underground. The
world has had some experience if radical Islamic extremists reacting to what
they perceive as oppression by heretical rulers.
This profound shake-up of the religious order has been
joined by similarly novel strikes against the political and financial order.
Under the guise of an anti-corruption royal decree, MBS and his faction may
“detain individuals or seize assets without any trial, process or disclosure.”
(Ibid). Thus far, four ministers and 11 princes have been detained, with a ban
on travel for all royal family members numbering in their thousands. The
arrests have relieved key leadership positions in the remaining national
security establishment that had not hitherto been effected by the rise of MBS.
King Salman, 81, initially appointed MBS as defense
minister, chief of the royal court, a top economic adviser and deputy Crown
Prince. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef was Crown Prince and interior minister
responsible for internal security forces, the secret police and all
counterterrorism operations. All of these roles shifted to MBS when his father
put Prince Nayef under house arrest in June of this year. Of the three core
ministries underpinning power, the National Guard was the last remaining power
base outside MBS’s grip, until Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah’s arrest in the most
recent crackdown. Another surprise was the arrest of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal,
billionaire investor and pro-reform modernizer.
The timing of the crackdown is also significant. It follows
weeks after MBS brought the world’s financial leaders to Riyadh to discuss his
Vision 2030 project and within it, the IPO of Saudi Aramco estimated to be
valued to be valued at $2 trillion which would make it the largest company in
the world. The money would be added to the recently created sovereign wealth
fund which is the vehicle to a diversified economy. No doubt MBS has in mind
the kind of visionary transformation that has taken place in neighboring UAE.
The arrest of Prince Alwaleed, the most business and finance
savvy of all Saudi leaders seems incongruous in this setting. Except that it
makes perfect sense once the role of the Trump Administration is taken into
account.
Jared Kushner had just returned from the third major
Administration visit to the Kingdom mere days before the Royal round-up.
Kushner reportedly spent four days with MBS, bonding into the early hours in
private talks.
Prince Alwaleed had famously tweeted that Donald Trump was
“a disgrace not only to the GOP but to all America” during the 2016 election.
He had not endeared himself to King Salman or MBS either, having been outspoken
against the latter’s appointment as Crown Prince. Reportedly the Talal clan had
been one of only three dissenters among 34 members of the allegiance council
that endorsed the King’s appointment of MBS.
Did Jared Kushner greenlight the crackdown? It certainly
looks like it. MI is reminded of Kissinger’s visit to Jakarta just days before
the Indonesian invasion of neighboring East Timor in 1975. The Kushner visit
bears all the hallmarks of very close coordination. This follows the visit if
President Trump at the end ot which he vocally declared the US’ seemingly total
commitment to the Kingdom.
The Saudi Aramco IPO will net as much as $1 Billion in
commissions and fees. On Kushner’s return to the US, President Trump, not known
for his subtlety, patience, or tact, tweeted that Saudi Aramco should list on
the NYSE. The smart play would have been to cut the deal privately and crow
about it afterward. Now London’s bid will be taken more seriously, if only to
give the appearance of independence. The fact is, however, the listing will go
to the US not because of anything Trump has said but because it’s the natural
choice given the focus of the US economy and the scale it will bring the
transaction.
This raises the bigger question of Trump’s Middle East
policy. OK, so that was a stretch; there is no policy in the traditional
sense. As in domestic policy, Trump’s
sole objective is to reverse whatever Obama did, regardless of the
consequences. The Saudis have been unhappy with America ever since President
George W. Bush ignored their advice and invaded Iraq. They knew the most likely
outcome would be an empowered Iran – their arch enemy. Why? Because America
likes to impose democracy and the majority of Iraqis are Shia. The chaos that
ensued was far worse than even the Saudis imagined. Iran was not only able to
essentially take over Iraq’s political life, it ran covert ops against the US,
killing thousands of US service men and women on Iran’s home turf. The Bush
Administration wanted to ‘bring it on’ by encircling Iran and ratcheting up the
pressure; at least, that’s how they spun it when the wheels fell off. Instead, Iran jumped at the opportunity to
engage in ‘forward defense’, killing representatives in adjacent lands. It
turned out that in fact America wan encircled in Iraq and Afghanistan, not
Iran. Welcome to 4th generation warfare.
The Saudis showed their displeasure by ignoring W’s pleas to
open up the spigots during a desperate 2006 visit to the Kingdom. Five dollar a
gallon gas was his punishment and contributed significantly to the economic
slow down that became a rout by 2008.
Obama fared no better. Wanting out of Iraq (the war of
choice) in order to focus on Afghanistan (the war of necessity), Obama’s
planned drawdown was too rapid to be stable by the time he was able to act. The
2017 putdown of ISIS in Iraq and Syria by indigenous forces shows that the
Iraqification of the war, had he stuck it out a little longer, would have
worked. Hindsight is a cruel master and unfair given that America’s war in Iraq
seemed endless and there were no good alternatives. The only way to get Iraq to
take responsibility was to force it. The free riding on the US had to stop. The
cost was the rise of ISIS.
In visits to the Kingdom at this time, Saudi military
officials were vocal in their criticisms on US policy under Obama in particular
as it impacted Syria. MI responded that the KSA had a substantial military
doing nothing and that America was reluctant to get into yet another ground war
in the Middle East. It was a rhetorical point, yet subsequent Saudi engagement
around the region suggests that on some level they agreed.
Saudi has long engaged its region via the deployment of
covert funds, not forces. Sometimes it worked with Israel, with whom it has a natural
intersection of interests against Iran and its proxy forces Hezbollah and the
IRGC’s Quds force. To these traditional foreign policies Saudi has recently
added conventional military deployments against Iranian backed aggressors in
Yemen (where Saudi has a long history, including participating in its civil
war).
More recently, under MBS, the Kingdom has used its new-found
American backed freedom to act forcefully in quarantining Qatar (home to the
USAF in the region) and to force the resignation of the Prime Minister Hariri
of Lebanon. Neither of these moves makes much sense to MI. Any dispute with
Qatar should have been managed subtly in the shadows for the sake of the
appearance of unity among Gulf Cooperation states. The Lebanon example seems to
be directed at destabilizing that country which is defacto a safe haven for
Hezbollah. Hariri was the key Sunni in a complex sectarian power-sharing
arrangement designed as a check and balance against sectarian forces prone to
violent disputes. MBS must have made the judgement that having Hariri inside
the tent was not enough. With the Syrian civil war resolved in the regime’s
favor with the support if Russia and in particular Iran and its proxies, the
calculations must have been that the Lebanese safe haven had to be denied to
Iran et al, even at the cost of another civil war in that fragile country. No
doubt MBS wanted to turn Lebanon into Iran’s Yemen. Further, this action would
not have been taken without American assent, either active or passive. Given
the instability along Iran’s direct borders in Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan,
the choice of Lebanon seems wrong-headed in the extreme. There already exist
plenty of opportunities to take the clandestine war to Iran right up to its
border and in extant conditions that are amenable to a proxy war. The choice of
Lebanon might also hint at a sub-rosa concord with Israel which has much
stronger reasons and access to disrupt on its northern border. Yet even in
their case, there are better reasons to undertake covert actions further away
from home while running traditional HUMINT ops inside Lebanon.
Saudi even went do far as to issue a warning to its citizens
in Lebanon to leave. If MI’s analysis is right, and there is a good chance that
we do not have sufficient insight from this remove to appreciate all the factors,
KSA and Israel (more accurately PM Netanyahu )
have much more to lose than to gain in the Lebanon gambit. That all of this is
taking place with US acquiescence is disturbing. Iran must be countered, but in
such a way as to use the abundant opportunities for clandestine mischief making
that already exist, not by spreading the regional war yet further.
Traditionally, Lebanon has been a difficult but useful space where all sides to
complex security dilemmas could meet and interact in the shadows. That can
still happen under a new civil war, or Israeli invasion, but these objectives
are unnecessary and will be counterproductive. Lebanon is at the brink with
Syrian and other refugees. If MBS/Netanyahu/Trump’s plan leads to war, it will
result in destabilizing Jordan, the last bulwark from which US forces and
covert teams can move with relative operational freedom. MI feels for the King
of Jordan and hopes that his counsel will be heard in Washington, if he judges
it even worth the political capital in making a case for moderation combined
with a smart covert plan. MI suspects that there is a stronger linkage between
the young princes in Saudi and UAE to the Administration through Jared Kushner
(all in their 30s) than there is between the Jordanian and Saudi Kings and
President Trump.
When he came to power, Obama wanted to reframe America’s
outlook in the region and clarify America’s respect for religious tolerance.
The focal point if this was the Cairo speech. Knowing bin Laden’s rhetoric
against US regional allies was effective and dovetailed with American distaste
in dealing with dictators, Obama wanted to walk the fine line between
criticizing Hosni Mubarak (for example) and encouraging sustainable (read
democratic) reforms. It turned out that the people of the region read much more
into Obama’s intentions than was actually there. Like Gorbachev, he read the
symptoms correctly he read the symptoms correctly, but his recommendation to
take some aspirin was interpreted as a call for open heart surgery. It did not
take long for the region to burst with reformist zeal. The people demonstrated
for jobs and a good life – after a decade of war imposed by the US they were
not calling for death to America or burning the flag. The Arab Spring suddenly
gave voice to a thousand pro-democracy micro-movements that were crushed by the
patient and highly organized radical Islamist movement that seized the
revolution and turned it into a democratic gain for the long-repressed Muslim
brotherhood.
This did not win Obama any friends in Riyadh, Bahrain, UAE,
Qatar, or Kuwait and elsewhere in the Gulf. Suddenly they all faced challenges
to varying degrees. It was known that, as in Egypt, there was no cohesion to
pro-democratic forces and that the instability of the Arab Spring would provide
a vacuum in which militant Islam could flourish. Some of these regimes were
reforming, but far too slowly to absorb the shock waves emanating from North
America. In addition to the regime v radical split, the Sunni v Shia overlay vastly
complicated things when Iran seized the moment to instigate turmoil from
Bahrain to Yemen.
To top it all off, Obama’s strategic nuclear agreement with
Iran, while masterful from the vantage point of global security and US interests,
outraged the Prince’s because it flooded Iran with desperately needed funds with
which they could intensify their proxy wars from Syria to Bahrain and beyond. The
long war in the shadows between Iran and the US and its allies, was thrust into
the limelight.
So by the time the real estate mogul and reality TV host,
who had a fine appreciation for gaudy mock-baroque interiors, was feted in the
finest palaces in Riyadh, he was ripe for the anti-Obama protests if the
princes. In fact, to the extent that Trump has any policy, foreign or domestic,
it is repudiation of anything Obama accomplished. The Trump-Saudi relationship
was a match made in heaven. Not surprisingly, Trump came out swinging against
Iran, Qatar, and in complete alignment with Saudi objectives. He was willing to
destroy the nuclear agreement despite the fact that the funds that concerned
the Gulf States had already been released to Iran. All that was left to lose in
the agreement was Iran’s obligations to refrain from developing a bomb. Giving
them the money and carte blanche to continue the weapons program was the worst
of both worlds for all concerned.
So why did he do it? Well, it was an election promise,
whether well conceived or not. It was also a Saudi demand. It repudiated Obama.
The fact that these superficial reasons were nothing by comparison to the
impact the decision would have by the time he took it seemed to concern him not
at all. At least some of his advisors seemed to realize what was going on and
prevented him from cancelling outright. But the bigger point here is the degree
to which he had been captured completely by Saudi thinking. As a diplomatic novice, he was not well
served by his number one domestic priority, to shrink the bureaucracy, and in
particular in this case, the Department of State. Still, when challenged about
the cutbacks at Foggy Bottom his response said it all: “I’m the only one that
matters”.
Capturing the undivided and uncritical attention if a new
and inexperienced Administration may appear to be a positive in the short term
but pose unanticipated costs over time. The emerging Trump=MBS relationship may
afford a degree of freedom that might otherwise have been moderated by good
judgement.
At first MBS appeared to be pursuing a China reform model.
Vision 2030 was ambitious, but it had to be if it wanted to catch up with the
degree if economic and social development sustained by similar reforms in other
Gulf states. Countries like UAE saw the coming peak in energy a while ago and
diversified. They offer attractive places to visit for Muslims and non-Muslins alike.
Saudi, by contrast, has a long way to go, outside of the comfort of royal
palaces. MBS knows this and no doubt has been champing at the bit to initiate
reforms for years. His ardor for change may be as insatiable as some of his
fiercest critics, with the exception that their ends are worlds apart.
Post Trump’s visit and the multiple visits by high level
delegations, including three Kushner trips, MBS seems to have decided to do
everything at once. He is following a hybrid China/USSR/North Korea reform
program, mixing economic reform with instant political freedoms (declawing of
religious establishment and police/driving for women), all topped off with a
draconian power-politics crack-down against alternative sources of authority
among the seven main branches of the ruling family. He now controls all
instruments of state power and authority in his hands. Previously these were carefully shared out
among competing factions in a balance of power among the families and tribes.
At the same time he has radically upset the political-religious balance of
power that has existed between the House of Saud and the clerics.
International relations is fundamentally about the study of
human thought and action. It is not like physics. It does not have hard and
fast rules. But if it did, the first rule if international relations would be
rapid political/economic/cultural change set in a contested strategic
environment, never ends well.
MBS is gambling the house that he can pull this off all at
once. No doubt he is driven by a concern that the forces of darkness within and
around the Kingdom have the advantage of time and energy. He is right to be
concerned. Yet despite the very different setting between the three models of
change and contemporary KSA, he may come to regret not sticking just to his
economic vision.
What’s the worst that can happen? Most commentary harks back
to 1979. It was a revolutionary moment. Iran underwent a radical Islamic
revolution. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a group of inspired Sunni
radical terrorists went all out for the ultimate prize - the Grand Mosque at
Mecca. There is no more serious responsibility in the Islamic world than to be the
guardian of the holy shrines. Thus the extended time it took to put down the
attack was a profound humiliation for the guardian, the King, and through him,
the entire system underpinning the state.
MI thinks that 1975 may be a better date to remember going
forward in thinking about KSA’s future. Ten years before, a nephew of the King
was killed by riot police as he demonstrated against the introduction of
television into the Kingdom in 1965. His brother, Faisal bin Musaid, mourned
his brother’s loss very deeply over the ensuing years. He assassinated King
Faisal, his uncle, in 1975. Palace intrigue is not new in the Kingdom. Faisal’s
father was himself deposed by a consortium led by the clerics. So recent events
are in some degree merely part of the ebb and flow of Saudi political life.
What is unprecedented is the concentration of all positions of power into one
pair of hands, at the same time as a wide spread crackdown against all
competing bases of power – religious, economic, financial and socio-cultural.
Grievance is the most powerful driver in contemporary
culture and politics. It is driven by narrative. One consequence of information
technology and social media in particular is the empowerment of people relative
to states, an individual or group can compete for global attention today in
wats that were simply not available pre-2000. The most compelling narrative
wins over the power of even the most repressive state. This is the context in
which one of the last near-absolute rulers created systemic instability in
their country by choice. It was not a necessity, at least not yet. The concern
here is that MBS has inadvertently merely hastened the day of reckoning and in
so doing foreshortened a wide range of viable options that might have mitigated
the radical change that would finally transmit the spring to Arabia.
Historically the greatest grievance and the power to do
something about it was resident within the House of Saud. Palace intrigue,
coups and even assassinations came from within. Focusing on the threat from
below at the expense of balancing internal divisions within family factions,
could well result in proving Lincoln’s old adage, that, "A house divided against itself cannot
stand."
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